We present an approach to classification of biomedical terms based on the information acquired automatically from the corpus of relevant literature. The learning phase consists of two stages: acquisition of terminologically relevant contextual patterns (CPs) and selection of classes that apply to terms used with these patterns. CPs represent a generalisation of similar term contexts in the form of regular expressions containing lexical, syntactic and terminological information. The most probable classes for the training terms co-occurring with the statistically relevant CP are learned by a genetic algorithm. Term classification is based on the learnt results. First, each term is associated with the most frequently co-occurring CP. Classes attached to such CP are initially suggested as the term’s potential classes. Then, the term is finally mapped to the most similar suggested class.